This land for which no pity wrings your breast,—
Why does the stranger’s sword her plains invest,
That her green fields be dyed?”
Petrarch.
ERE’S another snob trying to get us all cashiered! Confound those beastly newspapers,—just my luck!” exclaims an elderly and rather handsome man, who, sitting before his office table, has just opened an important-looking letter, headed with the royal arms printed in red ink.
“Just my confounded luck. Just at this time too, of all others, when my application to be appointed Protector of Aboriginals for the district must just have reached the chief. Now I wonder what Mrs. Bigger will say if I don’t get this extra salary as Protector, for I can’t send Jane down south to school, as I promised, if I don’t get more than my present pay, that’s certain.”
The blue-paper letter that has occasioned Inspector Bigger of the N. M. Police so much vexation—for it is this well-known gentleman who now sits nervously rubbing his eyeglass in the little hot office of the barracks—is dated from the bureau of the Superintendent of Police, Brisbane, and runs as follows:—
“June 4th, 1889.